


The Best Revenge

by Marta



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Backstory, Gap Filler, Gen, Original Character Death(s), Post-Reichenbach, Story: The Adventure of the Empty House, Story: The Final Problem, period typical anti-semitism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 19:28:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18976888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marta/pseuds/Marta
Summary: "I had of course read Doctor Watson's account inThe Strandand my brother's eulogizing letters carried by theDaily Telegraphthat preceded it. I was gratified by the latter's kind words, and even Doctor Watson's grudging admission of my criminal accomplishments did not go unmarked or unappreciated. A dead man will naturally have some interest in how he's remembered, or would if given the chance."In which Holmes and Moriarty both survive the Fall, and meet one last time after it all.





	The Best Revenge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trobadora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trobadora/gifts).



"Mister Holmes!" I cried out as I made my way across the market. "Mister Holmes!" 

It wasn't such an uncommon name to give our game away, and the expression on his face was more than worth the risk. He looked up from the plum-cart, a moment of unguarded recognition, then a deep blush following fast on its heels at being so transparent. He swallowed deeply, forcing his customary mask back into place. Near-three years' practice at playing dead; you would have thought he'd be better at it by now. But in his defense, mine was certainly not a face he ever expected to see again.

"You have me confused with someone else. The name is Sigerson."

"Is it indeed?" I chided him. My appearance was much changed (both by design and by necessity, some persistent injuries had stubbornly refused to heal) but my smile at least was still my own. I let him see it, let the old gleam at the prospect of revisiting our old connection show in my eyes, and saw a second glimpse of recognition in his. His breath caught in his throat, his eyes dilated just that little bit more. In his hand, the plum juice colored his palm a nicely symbolic red from where he'd grasped it too hard, breaking the fruit's skin.

I paid the vendor for his ruined fruit and offered Holmes my handkerchief so he might clean his hand. "Will you join me?" I asked. Choice demanded an alternative and so was an illusion between Holmes and myself at this point, much as it had been on the precipice. Still, we were in a public market, and sometimes illusions could prove useful. "My rooms aren't far," I lied, "and I would welcome the company of a… countryman."

Holmes stood resolute in his silence. There wasn't much he could say in a public market, of course, and I chose to credit that silence as cleverness more than shock, if only because I enjoyed thinking of him still as among the wise, and that my own losses at his hands were to some degree justified. The last near-three years had not been kind to him, and I needed some foothold to maintain my faith in him. "Yes," he said at last, pocketing the handkerchief (still mindful of forensics; at least he still held on to that). "Yes; lead on."

> ~*~*~*~*~
> 
> I had of course read Doctor Watson's account in the _Strand_ and my brother's eulogizing letters carried by the _Daily Telegraph_ that proceeded it. I was gratified by the latter's kind words; he was a hard man, a railway-engineer not easily given to sentiment. And even Doctor Watson's grudging admission of my criminal accomplishments did not go unmarked or unappreciated. A dead man will naturally have some interest in how he's remembered, or would if given the chance.
> 
> I was reminded of Tom Sawyer in that American novel, playing voyeur to his own funeral and reveling in the way death, almost by necessity, softens the rough edges on the memory of those left behind. I had become quite the voyeur in my own way, not on my actual interment but on other peoples' stories real and imagined. French academies were not plagued by the rigid distinction we Englishmen drew between propositional and narrative truth, so perhaps, as I found my new home on the Continent, it was inevitable I would be more receptive to the truth stories could often contain. Truly, though – Mark Twain? But my landlady's young son had left a copy behind, and I'd become quite entranced with it.
> 
> I told myself that now, more than ever, I had the time for such indulgences. That the change was benign. It was not only in public markets, apparently, that illusions could be useful things.
> 
> Like the novelist, and like those boys, accounts of my death had been greatly exaggerated.
> 
> But unlike those characters, I could not so easily return home. Not even were I simpleminded enough to think my compatriots would be so generous with their words in life. Even in Holmes's absence, Scotland Yard had evidence enough of my past deeds, and _particularly_ in his brother's absence, the elder Holmes would see that I paid full price for those crimes. I laughed at that, thinking of how much pressure they'd brought against O'Brien's wife, to force her to testify against her husband and nephew in the trial that followed Holmes's and my last engagement. Our crew at least had rarely needed to conscript the unwilling, and we were more judicious in our dealings with loose ends than I'd ever seen from the Crown's official agents, protected as they were by the Law.
> 
> No: my return to England would have locked me in a different kind of prison, with my former associates sharing close quarters. I would not have survived long, in any sense. So faced with death in the Alps or the court's judgment, I'd carved a third path, and when I was recovered enough to travel I'd made my way down to France. Found a position at the _Universite d'Aurvergne_. The growing hysteria over the Labouchere Amendment in England, France's status as the most likely option for immigration, and the university's not-unearned association as a haven of sorts for inverts, made my new colleagues disinclined to pry into my past. The fact that I was not overly given to passions in that area, and had released a wife from a long-cold marriage with my "death," did not make me less grateful for the discretion.
> 
> The fact that one Adèle Corneau-Holmes had kept an orchard in the region until her death some twenty-six months earlier, and that her grandson the great detective had spent his summers there as a child, was not entirely a coincidence. I had heard rumours, of course, strange stories from Tibet, Stockholm, Bloemfontein. I guessed I wasn't the only one who had survived the falls. And I was an exile, too; I knew the sentimental pull of ancestral homes.
> 
> ~*~*~*~*~

There was a certain row of boardinghouses perhaps a half-mile from the market, near to the university but far enough from the rooms favored by students to make it popular with several of us employed as tutors, lecturers, and associated staff. I kept a suite there myself, though it was much below my previous standard, and Holmes could be reasonably be excused for assuming we were headed toward that neighbourhood. The moment he realised we weren't, as we turned east rather than north, was not lost on me. His foot-fall was directed toward the wrong side of a fork in the road, and his heel grated heavily against the gravel path as he moved to correct himself. Still, he did not comment on it, not until I swung open the gate on its rusty hinges and led him down the lane beyond.

"You bastard," Holmes said as he placed their address. 

And there was a touch of the old fire. "It is harder than you might think to acquire decent rooms when one doesn't have a verifiable identity," I said. He opened his mouth to answer me on that last point, and I quickly cursed my choice of words; of course he of all people would be intimately aware of that challenge. "Besides, my income is much less than it once was, thanks to your interventions, and I can no longer risk supplementing it through extra-legal means." He gave a barking cough, no doubt covering a laugh threatening to break free. I shrugged. "I knew her house to be unoccupied, and they made for a comfortable retreat. I didn't _kill_ her."

Holmes pursed his lips in disbelief. I suppose I could not truly blame him.

"I was in hospital at the time. I'd write to Meirengen. I'd write them for the records if I thought either of us would still be in town when they arrived."

"Still," he countered, "you defiled her house."

"Absent a religious context, 'defiled' becomes utterly subjective and loses all meaning. I've left it as well-kept as I found it, better in some ways, and certainly treated it no worse than I did your own rooms in Baker Street." Holmes pressed his lips together in terse disapproval. "That's why it bothers you, isn't it?" I led him past the garden-gate and into the house beyond. "Is it a graver injury than forcing my way into your own rooms, that I might so impose on those close to you? Even once they were, strictly speaking, beyond such considerations?" A part of me wondered how he'd react if he knew about that time I'd taken tea in the Watsons' sitting-room, just because I could, but thought better of pushing against that particular nerve.

"Yes, damn you," Holmes said. "Perhaps not then, but yes. It seems I have changed – have been changed – quite a lot these last few years, and not wholly for the better."

I knew the kind thing to do would be to pity him, or to school my face into a mask of indifference and leave him his dignity. Against all probability, though, and even against my own will I felt my lips curling upward in an imitation of Lewis's Cheshire-cat. It was not just him, and so it was not only me.

"As men of science perhaps we should test that hypothesis," I said. "Let us start with the commonplace. Do you still take honey with your tea?"

> ~*~*~*~*~
> 
> The same month I'd joined the mathematics faculty, the university hired a refugee out of Odessa, one Ivan Davidovich, with an eye to eventually hiring him through their engineering school once his language skills had improved. Personally I wondered if his known Jewish ancestry might be the real cause of concern. The Jew Dreyfus's famous court-martial would happen the following year, and the long-simmering suspicions that had enabled it – of all Jews, and the foreign-born ones most of all – were already becoming evident. It was the only explanation I could come see for their delaying his appointment. They'd hired other academics, from Krakow and St. Petersburg, who spoke with a heavier accent, and his dossier certainly hired academics who spoke French with a heavier accent than his, and his scholastic credentials were certainly more verifiable than my own.
> 
> I liked the man. We were exiles both, presumed on the margins, and with histories we could not comfortably speak of. And he introduced me to pierogies and borscht. We often ate our lunches together, letting slip little details that would accentuate how different we were from those around me. He once taught me a niggun, as we drank our tea one afternoon in a garden near the engineering school: a wordless sort of hum his rabbi had once told him opened one up to higher meditation (and thus to God). I in turn sang him snatches from the 'Jabberwocky', Carroll's lovely bit of nihilism.
>
>> _'He took his vorpal-sword in hand; long time the manxome foe he sought -  
>  So rested he by the Tumtum tree and stood awhile in thought.'_
> 
> Ivan disappeared some five months after I met him, without a word to me. I could have gone to the police and told them how unlike him it was to just run off like that. How he'd caught a student cheating at his exams the month before, how the student had called him a filthy Shylock in a drunken rant, and how Ivan had been attacked coming home late at night on three separate occasions in the month since. 
> 
> And when they pulled his bloated corpse from the Tiretaine four days later, I certainly could have told them the tattoo on his shoulder, while in Cyrillic, hardly connected him with the criminal ring we would later name the _vorovskoi mir_. It was but a Biblical phrase, transliterated into his native alphabet: " _May God make you like Efrayim, and like Menashe._ Jacob's blessings to his grandsons through Joseph, the favorite son stolen away from him; a fitting encouragement for any Jewish emigré. 
> 
> If the police cared to find the cause of Ivan's death, they would do much better to start closer to home, even if that path was the less comfortable one. But of course I did no such thing. How could I tell them anything at all? 
> 
> Instead, I returned to my students and my solitary lunches, and tried not to dwell on how better a friend he'd been to me than I to him. 
> 
> The truth was, Ivan should have chosen a better companion; or no companion at all.
> 
> The truth was, in his absence I was utterly, bitterly alone.
> 
> So it was hardly a coincidence that I began skulking around the Corneau place not long after. That, on finding it both abandoned and well-isolated enough from its neighbours that I could slip in and out unnoticed, I forced my way in through the cellar door, stole the heavy iron keyring and had copies made in town. Began stocking the larder, spending weekends ensconced in those well lived-in rooms, running my fingers over threadbare quilts, family daguerreotypes and long-abandoned chemistry sets. I could attribute all but the last to my lessened position; I was, after all, a university lecturer making do on one's salary, and the old home was certainly more comfortable than the best rooms I could afford in town.
> 
> But to pretend that was the whole story? _That_ would have been a lie; and thus a sin.
> 
> ~*~*~*~*~

As Holmes and I sat in opposite chairs in the Corneau parlor, I felt a great swell of power. I could kill him and burn his body in the fireplace, or leave it rotting in the woods. I could keep him locked in the cellar or secret him out of town and take him wherever I chose. I could flay the very skin from his bones, own him body, mind and soul should my passions take a turn in that direction. He was at my disposal (poor fool), and beyond that he was thought to be dead. He would not be missed, and even if those who knew he still lived were to trace him back to Auvergne, why should they think of me, so long thought dead myself?

I would do no such thing, of course, since it would be poor stewardship of the gift I'd been given. There was so little left to me in this life that I could properly value. And Holmes had once said of us (at least if Watson could be trusted for an accurate account), that never had he risen to such a height and never had he been so pressed by an opponent. I quite agreed; indeed, the situation had been mutual. To have him laid out before me, with nothing but our twinned destinies keeping him alive – it was truly sublime.

Had that been part of why I laid claim to this house? To own his past even when I thought a _present_ or _future_ was too much to hope for? Perhaps. Yes.

He was speaking (had been speaking for quite some time, while I reveled in our current situation) about the proper diets for wrestlers in different stages of their training. I searched my memory for some imprint from the earlier conversations, coming at last to the defining natures of war-horses versus brood-mares. He was prattling on about Aristotle of all things, rather adorably so, and I found it wasn't just the heady thrill of possession so long denied me that was making it a challenge to keep my lips from curling into a smile. Here was a man like myself, driven outside the normal order and struggling to find a new language sufficient to his – to our – situation. Was it not much the same thing with me and my stories?

Or perhaps it was the wine speaking, or the late hour. We had long moved past tea and were well into our third bottle of _Château Latour_. So perhaps it shouldn't have come as a shock (though it did) when Holmes suddenly left comfortable philosophical abstractions behind for the more personal.

"Was it truly a coincidence that brought you to the _Place du Jaude_ today?"

"You know the universe is rarely so lazy."

"Mere chance does seem highly improbable."

"I've had word of you," I admitted. "Read accounts of you."

"Ever the spider at the center of his web," Holmes said. "I never could imagine you outside an intelligence network of some sort."

"Nothing so grand," I answered. "I have – maintained an interest, you might say. Read some accounts of you, or of deeds I thought might be yours due to their similarity with past adventures." I allowed a wicked smile to show on my face. "Really, we should compare diaries one of these days."

There would never be another one of 'these days' – a sad thought. Not if I still intended to release Holmes from my company with the morning's light. And of course I did; the thought of him out there in the world, knowing I was alive, attentive to any news of him, was the only possible outcome I could imagine preferable to having him kept locked away and at my mercy. He would thus be my revenge, and my salvation, by living the life he had denied me only through my act of beneficence. And the wisest course, of course, would have me assuming a new name as well. So be it; it wasn't such a high price, for tonight.

"I am thoroughly out of the 'Great Game,' as your Watson put it," I said, "and am content to satisfy my more sadistic urges through the instruction of multivariable calculus. But Auvergne is hardly the center of Europe that London was, or even Cambridge, and isolation can grow a bit wearing with time."

"You have been spying on me, then? For your own entertainment?" His cheeks flushed with more than the wine.

"Hardly spying, if I learned of you from public accounts. But yes, I have been bored, and so sought my pleasure vicariously. I have not sought news of you directly, but I have heard more than a few tales of intellectual prowess that bore your unique signature. And when I heard of the explosion in Montpellier, I knew you were in the country." I shrugged. "I took a chance. It was as simple as that."

He stared into the fire we'd lit in the hearth for a while, tilting his wine-glass to and fro so it reflected the light. Lost in his own thoughts. At last he shook his head in dismay. "I do not understand. Surely my knowing you still live puts you in considerable danger. I do not think you will kill me."

I laughed at that. "Holmes, you are the only person I can safely tell just now, and in truth the only person I truly care if he knows. As for murder – well, that would rather defeat the purpose of this whole night."

He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again, for once wordless. Save one, apparently: "Clever."

"I thought so," I said.

"I can't give away your continued existence without exposing my own failure, can I? Thus would end the hero of the Reichenbach Falls."

"And your Watson would know you'd let him grieve you for years on end," I added, "rather complicating your joyful Homecoming."

"I could send word to my brother, have him finish what we started that day."

"Not without alerting certain people to your own presence among the living," I answered. "In fairness I am safest if they think me dead as well. You have been remarkably discreet, I'll give you that. But you are not yet wholly in the clear, are you?"

He glowered. "Still, why take the chance? What possible profit is there in my knowing, save torturing me? You are not such a cruel man."

That truly caught me aback "How can you say that? After all that I have done to you? You seemed ready enough to lock me away three years ago."

"You were a criminal, and that is my duty as an agent of the Law. And you were a great man, if not a good one, so I felt obligated to meet you in kind. It seemed simple enough, but the things I have seen? Few things still seem so straight-forward." He pushed his spectacles (newly acquired) up his thin, hawklike nose and peered closely at me. "You enjoy the exercise of power, certainly, and have had more freedom to exercise it than most. But cruel: no moreso than most of Scotland Yard, or indeed of the Crown. I cannot love them in spite of that and judge you by a different measure." 

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers under his chin in his characteristic manner. "And you have changed, haven't you? Somehow. I will admit when you first confronted me this afternoon …" He shook his head at his earlier assessment. "I spoke harshly. Truthfully, but harshly, too. You have lost something very dear to you." I sat deadly still, for I guessed what he saw in me, and the memory of Ivan at least I wished to hold wholly to myself. "Beyond the loss of identity we both share, I mean. I cannot quite see what, or who, but whatever it was, you were moved to regret instead of rage or vengeance. And that is encouraging, isn't it? So no, I cannot see you risking the consequences of engaging me thus, only to see me twisting on the rack."

"Perhaps I don't wish to be forgotten." The words slipped out, and I clamped my lips together like a vice, as though that could change the past. Then, because context seemed important, I hastened to add: "By you. I wanted you to think of me as being out there, as a being in possession of a future." That had fairly shot through any preconception he might have of me as an amoral, unfeeling mastermind, so I decided to go the final step. In for a penny. "It's a wide, wide world, Holmes. I wished you to know I was making my way in it, beyond your ability to pass judgment, and I wished you to carry me back to London with you, when you go."

"London isn't safe yet," Holmes said, frowning. "I don't know that it will ever will be. Your last lieutenant is sly as a fox and twice as elusive, and until I can catch his trail again…." He trailed off.

"There perhaps I can be of assistance." Sebastian Moran – particularly a Moran with his back to the wall, or when confronted with the evidence he had been so thoroughly fooled for so long – was a liability, and Holmes might prove a useful tool in neutralising him. "Have you heard of the murder of one Ronald Adair?"

> ~*~*~*~
> 
> The City of Lights was the great crossing-over point in those days, between Eastern Europe and the West, and full to the brim with bearded men debating the merits of Frege and Engels, Veblen and Freud. One more could easily get lost among them, provided he didn't need to work to earn his keep and could thus restrict himself to the smoke-filled cafés. I had savings enough to last me six frugal months.
> 
> There was a risk, of course. Holmes had changed enough himself that, at the end of our shared night, I should have sped myself away as speedily as possible. He had set off on the train to Marseilles, but our dance together had begun with my speeding after his train as he left London for the continent. It would provide a fitting closure, were he to leave Moran be and run after me instead. Still, I lived in hope. And I wanted – needed – to know he was returned safely to his rightful place in London, before I began crafting my own.
> 
> I gave him six months; he needed only three: to see Moran locked away for his assault on Adair, to right things with Doctor Watson, and for news of said reunion to reach me all the way in Vienna. I couldn't help but marvel at the efficiency.
> 
> By then I was ready to be rid of Vienna's dank cafés and her self-important philosopher-kings. Odessa did hold a certain poetic allure, but there were too many memories associated with it, secondhand though they were. St. Petersburg, though: I had heard it was beautiful, and Russia seemed like a land ripe for my particular influence. It would do, for a start.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Trobadora as part of the Summer 2019 Homestice exchange. All hail [redacted], queen among betas. Thank you!


End file.
